101 Revisited
by Talisman
Summary: Just as the title says. Thought I would attempt it. Now finished.
1. Her Offering

Won't have to give what up? What does she mean?  
  
He sees soon enough. More than seeing and perhaps more powerful he feels the arc between the maroon and blue of their eyes. In hers he sees reflected the flame of the roaring fire, and half-hears, half-imagines a thin wail of despair. He blinks once, and places the sound as an auditory reminder of a past blocked out but no, most definitely not left behind.   
  
Whine and wine, this thought pushed through all others and he had an inexplicable urge to cackle. All this in a fraction of a second and then her breast was exposed to the air, the cool of the room (despite help from the hardwood logs fueling the fire), and exposed to his penetrating gaze and senses. Another phantom voice, this time a whisper which resembled a wild low hiss from a moist spot in the wood, in his ear "Boticelli".  
  
She waits, and feels the cool of the air caressing her moistened nipple. Her breathing is labored, and the drop of wine suspended from her flesh quivers, a liquid jewel. A litany passes through her mind, feed from me, feed from me, let me feed you, and a shiver passes again through her body as he stares into the core of her.   
  
The trip-hammer of her heart fuels the blood to her face as she sees him move forward slowly and deliberately, as if after much strain, he is freed from his moorings. 


	2. Blood

**__**

Author's note: the abbreviated passage below beginning with "This month" and ending with "this night" comes from the book of Exodus in the Bible.

Except that he was not moving slow, not at all. In the time it took to push two hot heartbeats of blood through his body, he was close enough to reach out and touch her. Instead he regarded her, his face a stone mask beset with rubies, as mysterious and unreadable as a granite god underground. His countenance was of ice and indifference, and Starling once again felt her flesh shiver instinctively. 

__

Oh, what have I done?

At the same time and perhaps in the same heartbeat, there was raging under the ice, and the god began to tremble at its foundations. 

__

Clarice, what have you done?

Savage her, savage her for making me feel this way, for doing it this way, her way, I could not save Her but will, by all that is unholy take her blood, wallow in it and make it mark me forever, mark myself with the lamb's blood- 

"The smell of blood, blood all around cooling when it hits the light..." He drops to his knees before her, and lowers his dark sleek head to her breast. She feels his warm breath counter the cool air and is aware that he continues to speak.

"This month shall be unto you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you. Your lamb should be without blemish, and you shall kill it in the evening. Take of the blood and strike it two side posts, and of the upper door post for I will pass through the land this night..." his voice faded to whisper. 

Starling by necessity breathed. Lecter's head lowered still farther, and his tongue caught the drop of wine which still impossibly remained. 

To be continued.


	3. What Becomes of the Lamb?

Lecter seemed to come back to himself, perhaps roused by the sound of Starling's gasp. Whether it was from revulsion, shock, or both he could not say. 

He did say "If only I could, I would feed from you for a thousand years. Use your good clean blood to mark the doorpost of my past." _Use it to bind the shattered pieces of the teacup, if I could. _

__

Good clean blood, eh? Did you not just feed me brains? What is your definition of good? Though Starling _had _ found them quite delicious. Caper berries... must have more caper berries. Food for thought. 

"Passover. God, Dr. Lecter?" Starling was startled at the clarity of her voice.

"My belief is inconsequential, don't you think? What influence does my belief or lack thereof exert upon the universe? Reality, Clarice, is what does not go away when one ceases to believe in it." 

He carefully reached up and fastened her gown around her, mindful and deliberate not to let his skin come in contact with hers. Gracefully, he settled back into a kneel.

"Or what doesn't come back, even when one cannot cease to believe in it." she spoke this thought aloud and waited, waited, waited an impossible stretch of time while what she had believed in seemed to flash before her mind's fantastically opened eye. Vaporous dissipating syllables, the color of sulphur. Then the maroon of the inside of her eyelids. Silence.

Lecter looked up at her from his kneeling position, his visage taking on a primal, lively countenance from the flicker of the fire. His tongue explored the familiar grooves of his palate and was surprised by a spontaneous desire to know if the terrain of Starling's mouth would feel the same under his tongue. Lecter kept his kneeling position, held fast by the truism she spoke, and by a strange and wicked shiver from his temple to where the flesh of his knee met with the burled wood of the floor. Something caught his eye, a brief bounce of yellow flame on porcelain, and he turned his head to look at it. A shard of broken teacup. Broken is all it would ever be, for all time. 

Starling, are you worth the trade of my agony and exquisite pain? Lecter bares his smile at this, his teeth white against the dark red background of his mouth. 

"Tell me Clarice, do you know what else the Bible requires on the night of Passover? Do you know what becomes of the lamb, Clarice?" Each syllable of her name, enunciated, as if he enjoyed rolling it on his tongue before letting it free. 

Starling knew, oh how she knew, "It is required that it be... eaten."

Lecter beamed with his wolfish maw and leapt at her. Both their cries, his of realization and triumph, Starling's of mortal fear, were drowned out by the explosion of the deep hidden heart of one of the logs, finally found by the fire. 

To be continued.....


	4. Live Oak

Starling's return to consciousness was joined by the odd sensation of being chilled and warmed simultaneously. A sweet taste lingered in her mouth, which Starling correctly surmised was chloroform. The taste and smell dissipated and then she was able to take in the environment around her. The smell of snow, and permeating this, she smell of a fire. The minute she was able to open her eyes, she was forced to close them again as she was assailed by the heavy smoke of wet wood.  
  
Starling was unable to turn away completely from the smoke. She discovered she was bound, her arms pulled above her head, anchored to she knew not what. Curiosity more than fear crept into her heart, and she listened into the dark. Her brain, analytical to a fault, did not refrain from wondering at her lack of fear. Perhaps she should be afraid. _But, I'm not dead so far_. She chewed on that but did not have it fully digested when her mind spoke up again.   
  
_Wonder if he'll have you wishing you were?_  
  
The light of the fire revealed her clothing as khakis. Not only that, she wore the same clothing she had on at Muskrat Farm. It smelled clean. No trace of porcine contaminant. Or human, for that matter.   
  
Starling found her legs to be steady and reliable. The fire was now downwind, and Starling was able to look above her. Rope, looped around her wrists in a Carolina rig. _How whimsical_, thought Starling. It was a wonder that the circulation to her hands had not been completely cut off. Her gaze traveled upward, to a remarkably stout branch of a Live Oak. The fire lit up the branch, which had overseen the forest here for over two hundred years. It looked to Starling like a great gnarled hand, its leafless limbs holding her by a thread. A solemn, still puppeteer not yet allowing its marionette to take on life.  
  
The rope was looped some twenty feet up the trunk. Next to its coils were strange growths and striations. The one who had placed the rope there earlier in the evening had been struck by them, and had stared, and run his fingers over them for nearly an hour. Embedded in the bark were the tusks of wild boar, pounded into the tender green wood when the tree was nearly half a century old, when the native people there thought them good luck for their hog catching vantage point. He would have liked the chance to show them to Starling later.  
  
Starling knew none of the drama associated with her branch, save her own. She called out into the dark perimeter beyond the fire.  
  
"Doctor Lecter?"  
  
His eyes came into focus and his breath plumed like smoke in the cold air.   
  
"Clarice."


	5. The Rest of the Story

The reflection of the fire in his eyes drew her. As he came nearer Starling fancied she saw him bearing antlers from his head, but then realized it was an illusion created by the winter-stripped saplings behind him. _Diana to his Actaeon_.  
  
"Clarice, Venus would weep to see your beauty."  
  
_Hannibal? Doctor Lecter? Let's stick with what we know_. Her own irony did not escape her.  
  
"Doctor Lecter, cut me down from here."  
  
"Cut you," he spoke slowly and cocked his head to the side, regarding her, "down....," he stood directly in front of her. Facing him she became aware of warmth spreading through her, and once again realized that she was not afraid. _Crazy maybe, but scared?... just not happening._  
  
A flicker caught her eye. The reflection of the flames flowing down the blood runners of his Harpy. _Does the sight of it send cascades of ice down through your veins and into your heart? Will the steel of it let your blood like roses on the snow? Jesus, I am poetic at the weirdest of moments._   
  
"Clarice, my lamb, my goddess. You are bound here to make things easier." His intense gaze countered the gentle calm of his words.  
  
"To make what easier, Doctor?," she waited for his answer as her trigger finger unconsciously explored the terrain of the thick rope above.  
  
"This."  
  
He moved behind her and before she could twist around in the orbit the rope afforded her, she felt the heat of his lips on her neck. They lingered softly for a moment, and Clarice felt the sensation of his tongue barely touching her skin. Such a small contact, thought Starling. _But we rock each other's worlds with the gentlest of physical touches, don't we?_  
  
Doctor Lecter let out a breath mixed with a moan of pleasure. His exhalation reached and cooled the tiny moist spot on her neck where his tongue had tasted, and it sent a delicious ripple of pleasure through her body.   
  
"And this, Clarice."  
  
Once again he faced her and the flames once again licked against the steel surface of his blade, this time directly under her chin.   
  
"Be still," was his whispered command, and she obeyed, trembling.   
  
The muscles in his forearm bunched and held tight as he drew the blade down her midsection to her navel.   
  
Lecter's face bore none of the tension of his working arm, his expression was detached and observant. He stopped his downward path to look at her, regard her and gauge her. Her shirt had been cleanly cleaved down the middle, exposing her skin to the cold of the air, and the heat of the fire and his eyes. The skin itself was bisected with a thin yet stark thread of blood, where his blade had grazed her. The sight of this roused his own blood, and it rushed through him, igniting him with a humming mixture of adrenaline and endorphins. Clarice was undoubtedly experiencing a bit of adrenaline herself. His eyes moved from the line of maroon to her face and her squeezed shut eyes.   
  
"Open your eyes Clarice. I want you to watch me taste you."  
  
Clarice opened her eyes and looked at Lecter. She looked at the blood against the white of her skin and thought of  
  
_Roses, rose petals in the snow. Blood on fleece, gliding easily over the lanolin in the lamb's wool, blood pooling on floor of the smokehouse, the floor is blanched and pale and luminous from the hog fat which had dripped there over the years, and over the generations, salt and lard, and the ground was striated and stripped in places, the voice of her mother's cousin filling in the gaps, explaining to her that when times had been hard and salt was dear they had dug up the salted earth and strained it over and over until they had a bit of salt to put on whatever they were fortunate enough to hunt down and kill...._  
  
And then his tongue was there, not barely tasting this time, but lathing over her scratched skin, and blotting out her bloody train of thought. Starling felt the blood pounding through her body, igniting her erogenous zones with a pulse of their own.  
  
Lecter breathed in her blood scent before permitting himself this unbelievable indulgence. His nostrils flared and the coppery smell he was so well accustomed to permeated his senses. Scent could not have prepared him for the sublime taste of her. _Her_. At long last.  
  
_The deer was a doe, as even young bucks would have had the distinctive antler pits which would have resulted from the shedding of their spikes in the fall. She walked through the snow with her head low, in the dazed and stoic manner characteristic of the mortally wounded. The invaders caught up to her easily and cut her throat, screaming in their rough tongue for a bowl or a tin can in which to catch the blood. The boy watching could smell the blood and in his hunger saliva rushed into his mouth, but there was nothing, nothing left_  
  
But _Her_, solid and real, and writhing under his sucking mouth.  
  
Lecter breathed against her, muttering her name over and over between tasting and sucking. The blood was cleaned away now, and he wanted her mouth. Following the light scratch that still remained, he kissed his way up, between her breasts, nipping gently at her collarbones, sucking under her jaw.   
  
Starling caught his mouth with hers as soon as he was within her reach. A sob of pleasure disappeared into his mouth as his hands, fantastically warm, cupped her breasts.   
  
"Clarice, you taste better than I imagined," he purred into her ear, making her shiver against him.  
  
Lecter shivered as his Starling ingeniously gripped the rope above her hands and pulled herself up. Gripping him around his waist with her legs, she was able to feel him, hard and hot between her legs.  
  
Lecter ached to penetrate her, to be deep inside her, allowing his body to join his mind in her. _Not yet_.. he wanted her to be ready for him. _Ready as she'll ever be_. He grinned against her breasts, and after giving the left one a parting gentle nip, he disengaged her legs from his waist.  
  
Starling cried out her frustration, and then pleasure as Lecter once again moved behind her, cupping her breasts. His hands roamed down to her belly, caressing her, and then into the waistband of her pants. She arched against him, and felt his chest vibrate with a low groan as she pushed against his erection.  
  
Lecter divested her of her remaining clothing.  
  
She shone, and he was powerless to do naught but take her and use her and be used. _Can you do it, Clarice, can you envelop me, may I penetrate you with all that I am..._   
  
Being penetrated by him was exquisite and slow. Starling gripped the rope above her hands, and with he behind her, his hands on her waist as a fulcrum, she locked her legs around the backs of his knees.  
  
_Lecter was inside her then and she was ready, she was more ready than she had ever been in her life, and the hot tight muscles of her body held him and stroked him. Starling wanted him to feel good, feel pleasure because of her, to please him physically as she had pleased him mentally, and he took her, stroking her clitoris with his fingers until she cried out fiercely, and gave to her all he had to give until he shook with the strain and the sensation that she was pulling the semen from his body and he was helpless, helpless to stop this..._  
  
After.   
  
He took her down and freed her hands, and carried her back to her bed. Later he washed her, and pleasured her again with his hands and mouth. When he had to leave their bed for a short time, she did not question him. She missed him terribly though.  
  
After the distasteful task of the disposal of what remained of Krendler was completed, Lecter returned to the great Live Oak which had overseen the wild and orchestrated mating ritual hours before.   
  
Climbing was easy for Lecter, and he used the remains of the rope to reach the large branch suspending it. Once again he ran his fingers over worn tusks in the wood. Lecter rammed the blade of his Harpy as deep into the wood as it would go.   
  
He gazed upward, as much a predator as any nocturnal raptor hunting these woods. His eyes fell upon the golden glow of candlelight in the window of the cottage far beyond in the darkness. Nearly soundlessly he bounded to the ground, and made his way back toward the light.  
  
  
The End  



End file.
